Inspired by Tony Stark's assistant in Iron Man, Chad Barraford's DIY digital life assistant listens and talks to him, monitors his apartment and keeps him up-to-date on current events.

Chad Barraford's favorite part of the firstIron Man movie was main character Tony Stark's life assistant, named Jarvis. Unlike the original comic, in which Jarvis was Stark's human butler, the movie version of Jarvis is an intelligent computer that converses with Stark, monitors his household and helps build and program his superhero suit.

"One of my initial thoughts when I saw Jarvis in the movie was, 'Wow what an amazing technology; I'd love to have this. Maybe I'll have it when I'm 80 years old,'" says Barraford, who spends his days providing Mac-related tech support for colleges and universities. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized it wasn't actually so impossible. "I thought, 'maybe I can't develop Jarvis exactly, but what can I do?'"

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A lot, it turns out. After two weeks of tinkering and AppleScript coding, he booted up his own "digital life assistant," which he also named Jarvis. Running on a four-year-old Mac Mini, Jarvis wakes Barraford up in the morning, fills him in on real-time weather reports and breaking news via instant message and tracks his financial transactions, Netflix arrivals and Amazon packages. And just like his Hollywood counterpart, he can respond to verbal commands—and even talk back. For all of Jarvis's talents, he came at a bargain: $691.98 to be exact, which includes the Mac Mini, radio-frequency-identification (RFID) tag reader, an X10 home automation system, wall speakers and a wireless microphone.

Here's How Jarvis Works

Jarvis Can Talk

Barraford developed a language interpretation system that employs MacSpeech Dictate, a program that converts speech into text so Jarvis can interpret it. In this video, Barraford demonstrates Jarvis's listening and speaking abilities.

He Can Wake You

Jarvis Watches Over the Home

Barraford gave his dog and his close friends RFID keychains so that Jarvis would know when they are in the apartment. "He figures out who is home and who isn't, and he changes the environmental settings based on that information," Barraford says. For example, Jarvis uses the X10 system to turn off the lights if no one is home, and when friends are over he keeps Barraford's Facebook notifications private, instead of reading them aloud like usual. In this video, Barraford demonstrates the RFID tag reader.

And He Can Even Help With Migraines

Jarvis really comes in handy when Barraford gets a debilitating migraine headache, which occurs about once every other month. An instant message is all it takes to switch Jarvis into migraine mode, which calls for him to send an e-mail to Barraford's boss, update Twitter and Facebook and dim the apartment lights. Here is how it works.